


Depleted

by falter



Series: Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations, Or Something [2]
Category: Bandom, My Chemical Romance, Star Trek: The Next Generation
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-23
Updated: 2018-12-22
Packaged: 2019-09-25 03:43:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17113817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/falter/pseuds/falter
Summary: Love and love and loss. And the strength that can result.





	Depleted

**Author's Note:**

> Posting this in three chapters overall, but as I've been assured the first can stand on its own I figured I'd let it do so. In the same universe as _Charity, Humility, & Faith_.

What’s the opposite of once upon a time? Someday, when things are better? When we’ve become more just and whole, far in the future? 

Whatever it is, that’s where the story begins. 

In the year 2345 — an excellent portent, you would think — a pair of kind, earnest, and principled people welcome their firstborn. They share their joy with their own parents, siblings, family, friends, and colleagues. Soon, the infant becomes a child who is curious and loving, tempestuous and creative, determined and effervescent. In 2348, the child gains a sibling, and the family settles into a new formation, content.

It’s not all fairytale, of course; there are struggles and frustrations, the same as any family. The parents both make choices that reflect the fact that they are whole people, whose interests, ambitions, and abilities don’t always fit together perfectly. But they talk, both together and with their children, and they compromise, and in the end the four of them make a life that is stable and fulfilling: the parents both find roles doing what they love as engineers aboard a Federation colony supply ship, a vessel large enough and away from port so regularly that it’s nearly a space station in its own right. 

It’s a good home for curious, active children. They visit many worlds, learn about many cultures, meet many many people. And almost always, they sleep in their own beds at night, knowing they are loved and safe and secure. And very often, despite their ever-moving home, they are visited by their extended family, aunts and uncles and cousins and more, and very especially often, they are visited by their mother’s parents. Their mother’s mother is a hero to the older child especially; she is tall and grand in her uniform (though admittedly less tall as he grows older), wise and insightful (this never changes). She is a Starfleet Admiral, and the other children — and not a few of the adults — on the supply ship talk about her like she is famous. Despite all that, she will sit at the table to draw pictures or paint with Gerard (for that is the older child’s name), and play games with him and his brother and his friends, and curl up in bed with Gerard and Mikey (for that is the younger child’s name) to whisper stories of her travels to them in the dark, until they fall asleep. 

They love their grandfather, a xenobotanist, very deeply as well. He is a quiet man who holds them close and talks to them about the beauty that can be found everywhere in the universe. But for Gerard, it’s his grandmother whose approval and interest he seeks. It’s not a failing; children should be able to take the love and support of their families for granted, for all that not every child can. Gerard was just lucky to find his hero close at hand rather than in a history or on a broadcast. 

The children both thrive. 

Gerard has no aptitude or desire to enter Starfleet, like his parents or grandparents, but he loves the ideas that drive it, the core ideals of the Federation. His itinerant upbringing fostered a love of travel, of meeting new people, of building understanding and fostering mutual support between radically different civilizations and cultures. It’s what drives his grandmother as well, so perhaps it’s down to nature more than nurture, but never mind, the result is the same. Diplomacy seems like a natural calling, but that’s a task monopolized by Starfleet. Independent mediation, though — that’s within reach, and something that he has the connections to pursue. 

He studies rhetoric and sociology, history and linguistics, languages and cultures. When he’s seventeen, he leaves home and his parents and his brother. He does odd jobs on small ships for his passage, and he spends six or eight months at a stretch on Vulcan, Andor, Qo’noS, Orion, Ferenginar, and Betazed. He studies diplomatic history and assists with minor treaties and learns to love the worlds outside of the Federation as much as the ones within. He sees his family less than he wishes, but he knows he has time to remedy that. He writes letters to his grandmother full of his days and plans, but calls her less often than he would like. He has time to remedy that as well. 

In 2367, Gerard has a fulfilling, fascinating, and exciting future ahead of him. 

In the middle of a three-day route tariff discussion he’s helping facilitate between a shipping company and a planetary alliance, it all falls apart. 

Some outside power, one single enormous ship, has cut a fast path toward Earth, leaving whole planets depopulated, their defenses — if they had any — destroyed. By the time the news reaches the small outpost hosting Gerard’s meeting, Starfleet and the Klingon Empire both have attempted a defensive stand, gathering all available ships to block the hostile force at Wolf 359. And they had been annihilated. There are no details; everyone is uncertain; everyone is terrified. 

Updates come quickly, which is both merciful and not. Merciful, because the hostile ship is stopped before harm comes to Earth, somehow. Not, because there are details on the losses at Wolf 359. Over 11,000 confirmed dead. Thirty-nine ships destroyed, and more disabled. An unknown number of prisoners taken, now presumed dead. 

The USS Xie Daoyun, under command of Admiral Elena Rush, Gerard’s grandmother, is on the list of ships lost. 

He finds the fastest available ship to return to his family. 

He, and the news, arrive together. 

She is presumed dead. But confirmation isn’t necessary; it’s enough that she isn’t among the survivors. 

Gerard’s parents are subdued and grieving, grateful to have Gerard near, but committed to following routine, going to work, preparing meals, keeping the household. His brother is distant, and spends his days away from their quarters with his friends.

Gerard, though, is adrift and off-kilter. Home, but alone, uncertain, and hollow. 

After four more days Gerard and Mikey’s grandfather arrives. He’s wan and still, his right eye and right arm gone, a mass of scars running down the side of his face and continuing onto what’s left of his shoulder. Gerard’s mother holds him and weeps and tells him how grateful she is that he survived.

He stays silent. Gerard sits with him, buys liquor from the ship’s stores and shares it. They spend their days in silence, side by side, drinking until they are numb, until they can sleep. Gerard isn’t grateful that his grandfather survived. He is ashamed of that, but it’s true. He would trade this silent, stricken man in a moment to have his grandmother back. He thinks that his grandfather would probably agree, and he refills both of their glasses. 

It feels right to Gerard, grieving like this, like the world has ended. It’s all the same if he falls asleep in the chair or manages to stumble to his bed, if he eats or doesn’t, if he wears the same clothes -- the clothes he was wearing when he first heard the news -- for weeks on end. 

Grief is strange anyway, an odd thing disconnected from time or place or activity. Heavy and invisible and consuming all the air in the room. So loud he can’t hear anything else. 

When Gerard’s grandfather finally breaks his silence, it’s jarring. A whisper, at first, repeated over and over, louder each time. A protest. Sobs, then. 

Gerard isn’t sure what the words are, doesn’t want them, doesn’t bother. He watches his mother drop to her knees in front of her father, holding him as he finally cries, crying herself, comforted in turn by Gerard’s father. 

Gerard just watches them, like he’s shut behind a pane of glass. There’s something, though: a tendril of feeling that works its way through. 

Anger. Still distant, but it’s there. At this scene. At his family, finding comfort. At his grandfather, for not continuing to drink, unmoving, until he dies. The way Gerard wants to. 

He stands, a little unsteadily, collars what’s left of the bottle, and walks out of his family’s home.

As Gerard moves around the ship, looking for a fresh, full bottle and a quiet corner away from everything alive, he imagines he’s wrapped in a shroud or a dark fog. Like he’s under an enchantment that keeps people at a distance, makes them not matter. It’s comfortable. It’s where he plans to stay.

Gerard knows that time passes, that his brother comes to find him, that his parents try to bring him home. It just all seems like something happening to someone else. Someone else takes a swing that connects solidly with his brother’s jaw. Someone else throws a bottle at Gerard’s mother, showering her in broken glass when it hits the bulkhead. Someone else struggles as they’re herded into a brig, someone else is thrown off ship at some spaceport. 

Someone else wakes up stinking so badly of piss and vomit that even Gerard can smell it. 

Eventually, though, the fog around him gets thinner, no matter how much he drinks. 

Or rather: when he drinks enough, it’s there. 

It’s the in-between times, when he misplaces a bottle or can’t talk his way into another, or first thing when he wakes up, or when he makes the rare mistake of taking a shower. Those times, everything around him seems too real, too hard and solid and sharp. The other people living in-between, the makeshift shelters that convert jeffries tubes and the spaces around machinery into places to sleep. Scavenging food and clothes from the recyclers. Washed up here, just like Gerard, with no comfortable occupational slot prepared for them by a benevolent society. At least none here on this port, where there’s no accommodation for extraneous personnel unless they’re just passing through.

Gerard can almost laugh, then, at who he used to be. The person he used to be would never have imagined that people lived like this, within the Federation. He wonders, too, about what other dirty, ugly things the person he used to be didn’t know about. 

As the fog gets thinner, he starts to dread the inevitable day that the ship he used to call home will make port here again, that the people he used to call family will come looking. 

When the fog is thicker, it doesn’t matter if they come, he knows he won’t even notice them. Or they will never come, knowing how empty and malignant he is. Or he’ll be lucky enough to die before they arrive. 

But when the fog is thinner, he’s afraid to face them. He’s afraid of their disappointment and pain; he’s afraid of his own rage and despair. He’s afraid they will convince him to come home; he’s afraid he’ll go back to who he was; he’s afraid they will somehow convince him to stop missing her.

Gerard finds a place to bathe, peers at himself in a mirror: hair lank and hanging to his shoulders, skin thin and chapped, flesh simultaneously gaunt and bloated, eyes bruised and bloodshot. It’s satisfying; he looks how he feels. He digs through bins until he has a full set of clothes that smell inoffensive and lack holes that look unintentional. He puts his name on the deadhead list, marking the entry for any transport, any destination. 

He’s on a small freighter by the end of the day. The crew keeps a dry ship, disallowing even synthahol, and the ache in Gerard’s head grows with every minute that passes. The seat he’s in is meant for a paying passenger, though, with a data and entertainment feed to distract him.  
It would be overwhelming how much news he’s been unaware of, if he cared about any of it. He can’t help it, though, when he sees an alert that there are newly-declassified data about the attackers from Wolf 359.

He gags twice, reading it, drawing stares from the other passengers and hard, judgmental looks from the crew. There’s nothing in his stomach, though, beyond bile. 

The Borg. (They must have captured her alive.) Implacable and unwilling to turn from their goal. (So many prisoners on that enormous ship, and she would have been among them.) Stopped. (She had been alive.) One prisoner rescued. (Millions of prisoners. Collateral damage.) One prisoner fully recovered and returned to his command. (She had been alive and her own people had murdered her.)

The enchantment is broken; the fog is gone. Gerard is awake and aware and alive. He’s going to stay alive. He’s going to make them pay.

There is no happily ever after. Life’s too complicated for that.


End file.
